[david_obrien]

Thanks for your comment. As I mentioned to others, I followed what other companies are doing and what actual customers (not just Enterprises) asked me to do.

If I just put a "contact us for pricing" button onto the website, would that make you check the rest out and potentially sign up for a trial?

Also, ARGOS is still early and the pricing, to be completely transparent, is still very custom depending on the value a company communicates to me. It's not meant as a trick, otherwise I wouldn't give out a free trial for 14 days to everybody without even asking for a credit card. It's genuinely a "I don't really know yet how much to charge as a baseline".

[anamax]

You don't understand where you are in the business lifecycle.

You're very early. Paying customers are the most important thing for you to get.

However, it doesn't matter how much the first 1% (of your target market) pay, now or in the future. (If you're successful, they're only 1%. If you're not successful....)

Let's assume that success is 100k-1M paying customers.

Anything that gets in the way of someone being one of your first 1,000 paying customers is bad. Not telling the price upfront is one such thing. Trying to charge "market/what it's worth" is another.

Now is not the time to optimize pricing. In fact, you should tell the first 1-2% of paying customers that they will always and without any effort on their part get better pricing than anyone else going forward.

Yes, you should ask them what they think other people should/would pay....

[david_obrien]

I appreciate that comment, thanks. It does feel a bit like a catch22, that I am definitely trying to solve.

ARGOS does have early paying customers, and of course they are heavily discounted (and they know).

You mention not telling a price is an issue (and so have others, point taken), but also say I shouldn't focus on price right now. I'm trying not to. So, what's your recommendation? Should I remove the page? Rename it to something like "Plans" and not "Pricing"? But then I'm still not telling you how much it will be. I know how to deal with this when talking to someone, but what I'd be really interested in what you would expect on a website, knowing what you told me.

Seriously, thanks!

[anamax]

Put low prices on the pricing page together with a note along the lines of "prices/terms are negotiable". That page should probably also mention that customers now will always pay less than later customers.

Be as friction-free as possible. When you talk with someone, ask if there is anything that would have helped. (The problem being that you want to hear from the folks who didn't talk with you.)

Note - while you want an interesting number of paying customers, you don't want any bad customers, where bad means "suck up a lot of time, provide no benefit."

Be flexible up to the point where you feel that you're being take-advantage of.

For example, if you're offering 15 days free and you're asked for 30, that's probably okay (and may be useful information telling you what you should offer). However, if someone demands 6-12 months, thank them and tell them to go elsewhere, nicely.

[david_obrien]

Thanks, those are great tips and I've just implemented some of those.

Thanks again, this is super helpful!

[windexh8er]

The landing page looks nice. I feel like, based on your comments, you really are trying to build a product for customers - and not building towards some esoteric sales figure. Some comments from someone who's worked for a number of "enterprise" security vendors over the last decade...

Your product is competing in the CNAPP (Cloud Native Application Protection Platform) space. I'm sure you already knew this, but you may want to look at how companies have merged CSPM/CIEM/IaC/etc tooling to get to this "Gartnerized" name and just know who's who in the competitive landscape.

14 days isn't long enough to make a decision for most organizations unless they are really small. I'd suggest leaving that in place but also extending that to 30-45 days (1 month workflow) for prospects that will, in turn, go through additional resistance to validate they're truly viable customer candidates. Those things could be a 15 minute qualification call where you have a list of things you want to review with them to understand the fit (good feedback loop for you in features).

Standardize on your pricing - you need to understand this so you're both not losing money and so that you don't turn customers away because of the unknown. You can always have a custom pricing tier or an "Ask Us" option. If you don't know what your baseline cost for a customer is - then figure it out quickly.

Demos can go a long way - since you're a small shop you need something that won't soak your time, so I'd suggest taking your customer's top couple pain points and recording a nice looking demo that won't cost them more than 10 minutes to watch. People in this space want to see the product. There are so many security tools that a lot of buyers already have too many - so they want to see what it is and many customers are also looking for ways that new tooling can be integrated into existing workflows. There is no "single pane of glass" anymore for customers and instead it's morphed into, as I like to refer to it: "single pain of glass", because every vendor claims you only need them. Right.

If you have any questions I'd be happy to chat - [my_hn_name] at counterbrea dot ch. Best of luck!

[david_obrien]

I am indeed. I've seen those issues one too many times as a consultant, and I never got to really(!) fix them as I was only ever brought in as a band aid really, not strategically.

Yeah, CNAPP is the new acronym for where we probably best fit right now. I will continue checking out some of the other players.

I initially had a 14 day trial, then people (not potential customers) told me that would not be long enough, so I increased it to 30. That did not make a difference at all. Smaller companies still signed up and converted, larger companies "ignored" any time limits and just assume that those don't apply to them.

Based on all the comments now I wonder if I should have a "base" plan that has the cost on the website and an Enterprise / Custom plan with a "Contact us" button. I pretty much know what a customer costs "on average", so that's not difficult.

Curious, did you see the short demo video on the website? There is a short one on the main site "below the fold" and there are two more in the "Resources/Videos" section. I am working on a longer version that I can send out to potential customers instead of a demo initially. Yeah, I've seen and felt the "single pain of glass" many times :D

I'd love to take you up on that offer, thanks, a lot!